System Restore not working

My son is having problems with his Medion computer, it is 4 years old > Pentium 4 > CPU 2.53GHz 2.52GHz>512mb RAM>Windows XP Home Edition.
Once his pc has booted up, the scroll bar changes from blue to white & nthe sound does not work, although when it boots up it works ok.
He has tried to do a System Restore & the following message appears.>
System Restore is not able to protect your computer. Please restart your computer & then run system restore again > tried that, twice & still same issue. Checked that system restore was working & set on automatic < ok > Tried rebooting again, still same issue.
Can anyone help?

It's hard to diagnose the bootup problem -- but it sounds like it might be related to a buggered Windows update. Open the taskmanager (ctrl-alt-del) and see if "svchost.exe" is consuming excess resources.

If it is, run services.msc and locate the entry for Automatic Updates. Double click that and set the startup mode to disabled and reboot. If that resolves the problem you should probably follow the instructions here:

>> Problems with System Restore unfortunately usually require that the cache be purged and reset by turning off (disabling) System Restore, rebooting and then turning it back on. This would fix it for the future but of course would be of no help for this current problem.